There has been tremendous growth in retail sector due to consistent increase in the global population. Several consumer goods/commodities from different retail businesses are made available to the public by means of private retails shops, shopping-malls and government funded retail shops etc. In order to maintain the equilibrium between the demand and supply of these retail commodities, it is essential to track the sales data of these commodities sold in multiple areas by the above discussed means. Further, such tracking of sales data can help the consumer goods production businesses to monitor the purchasing behavior of the consumers to enhance their future business development plans. Thus, collection and analysis of sales data is required which can depict the sale trends for a particular period of time in a particular geographical region. The sales data collection and analysis is very critical in rural regions where demand supply lifecycle of retail commodities is very critical to targeted audience in order to survive in various climatic conditions and emergencies.
In urban areas, generally the sales data is acquired through Point-of-sale (POS) system of the retail shops or shopping malls. The POS system hosts billing machines comprising a bar-code reader and a computing system adapted to compute the total bill of the materials sold at that particular POS. Each of the articles/commodities sold through these retail shops or shopping malls is in packaged form and comprising a unique bar-code attached to it.
During billing at the POS, the bar-code attached to each article or commodity is scanned by means of the bar-code reader to retrieve the details associated with the article/commodity including the quantity of the commodity, manufacturing details and price thereof. The computing system is then adapted to cumulatively calculate the aggregated bill for the purchased commodities. Further, these details are stored in the billing machine which can be further transmitted to the consumer goods manufacturing industry for their future marketing and/or business development needs. Similarly, these details can be acquired by the government offices for their record in order to monitor demand-supply ratio of the retail commodities in a particular region. Another means to acquire sales data in urban regions is to retrieve the sales data details from credit card companies. These means of data acquisition are more prominent in developed countries wherein Retail stores and food chains are equipped with centralized systems for data acquisition and analysis. However, these methods of sales data acquisition cannot be implemented in rural regions due to several socio-economic problems and financial limitations. Therefore, monitoring of sales data in rural region is still done using traditional bookkeeping system.
In the traditional bookkeeping system, the sales data is collected from the shop owners by interviewing them personally. However, this traditional method of bookkeeping is highly unreliable and inaccurate due to lack of practicing a systematic process for keeping track of articles issued/sold to consumers. Further, the utilization of billing machines as that of urban areas cannot be implemented in the rural areas primarily due to involvement of overall infrastructure cost of billing machine and that of the bar-code reader. Also, there is constant lack of adequate supply of electricity in rural areas which may hamper the working of the billing machines due to frequent power-cutoff. Many articles in the rural shops are not sold in packaged form. Generally, the articles such as food grains are sold as per the quantity demanded by the consumer. As a result of this, the utility of bar code reader is restricted. Further, the shop owners in the rural area may not be proficient enough to operate the computing devices such as billing machines. Thus, in the present scenario, the existing systems are unable to accurately collect the details of consumption/sale of consumer goods in the rural areas, especially due to lack of a proper bookkeeping system. Consequently, this leads in inability to obtain statistics/trends related to consumption of articles/goods for a rural zone.
Hence in the light of above lacunae observed in the art, there is a long-felt need to implement an affordable and easy to use existing mobile communication apparatus for sales data gathering and analysis thereof for rural region with the assistance of a daily used communication device such as mobile phone. More particularly, there is a need for a method and apparatus that enables collecting and analysis of sales data in rural areas that helps in avoiding the problems of electricity shortage, high infrastructure cost and unreliable/inaccurate bookkeeping systems. There is a need to collect sales data from multiple retail stores in a rural region using the existing mobile communication network in order to perform sales analysis. Further, there is a need for an apparatus and method for sales data gathering using the existing communication resource such as daily used mobile phone with no additional electronics/computing hardware and thereby analysis which is minimally intrusive and highly intuitive to fluctuations in sales at retail stores in rural regions.